Pamela Richardson

• Geography DPhil.
• Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield

With the intention of developing more democratic processes of knowledge production to support innovation processes, a critical methodological approach was developed within the frame of two transdisciplinary “research for development” projects in Kenya and Tanzania. In the discovery phase of the transdisciplinary projects, five smallholder farmer gr...

Many Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) projects continue to treat smallholder farmers as a homogenous social group and ignore the de-facto exclusion of certain subgroups that are hard to reach due to a variety of social, economic or cultural factors. This study took place as a first step in an AR4D project (Trans-SEC) that focussed on in...

When concerns for gender equality, social inclusion and indigenous knowledge are not considered, the development of technical or knowledge-based solutions to food insecurity are more likely to be ineffective. In this presentation, we aim to bring together insights from two AR4D projects to show how feminist approaches can complement transdisciplina...

The European Union (EU) recently terminated the Sugar Protocol, which had provided a guaranteed minimum price for sugar exports from countries in the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group. Caribbean sugar producers have responded in a variety of different ways. This paper engages with the adjustment of the Barbadian sugar sector; in particular,...

In terms of digital inclusion, a global gender gap has been widely documented with women more likely to face digital exclusions, particularly in rural areas and especially in the Global South. Digital inclusion initiatives (DIIs) aim to address these disparities by providing hard-to-reach groups with access to digital infrastructures and/or compete...

Ankit Kumar, Stephanie Butcher, Daniel Hammett, Sandra Barragan-Contreras, Vanessa Burns, Ollie Chesworth, Gregory Cooper, Juan Miguel Kanai, Hannah Mottram, Sammia Poveda and Pamela Richardson This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) repres...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represented a key landmark in collaboration and shared agenda-setting to address global challenges across scales and geographies. However, despite initial optimism that measurable goals would support accountability and transparency in development, progress towards realising goals has been mixed. Global devel...

This paper documents efforts to support a feedback and sharing process using Community Cinema and Participatory Video (PV), in the context of ending a five-year agricultural research for development (AR4D) project. By the final year, some troubling patterns of transactional interaction between researchers and farmer-participants had become establis...

Participatory Video (PV) is geared towards fostering dialogue around a shared issue. Videos developed with smartphones and similar devices are created by participants as a tool for communication and reflection, which can support many different steps along a participatory research journey. Videos communicate the participants’ perspectives, while the...

Permaculture is an approach to sustainable design thinking, agriculture, and community, as well as a globalized movement. This article explores how different practices and processes of permaculture have generated different political registers of “community,” at three permaculture sites in Zimbabwe. Speaking to recent online media that asks “Is perm...

Upgrading local food value chains is a promising approach to invigorating African food systems. This endeavour warrants multi-disciplinary North-South collaboration and partnerships through participatory action research (PAR) to help leverage appropriate upgrading strategies (UPSs) with a focus on local stakeholders. The more disciplines, cultures,...

In conventional agricultural research for development (AR4D) projects, decisions about rural innovation activities often rest with scientists. In transdisciplinary AR4D projects in Kenya and Tanzania, we designed a methodology aiming to give key decision-making rights to the farmer groups involved. Five collaborating groups were facilitated to expl...

While efforts are increasingly made to democratize research relationships, empower participants and include marginalised voices in agricultural research for development, it is acknowledged that power imbalances in knowledge creation remain integral to researcher-participant relations. Moreover, published results seldom report on the different dimen...

An impact assessment of food-securing upgrading strategies (UPS) can be performed to assess actual and potential UPS effects at the local level. We developed an assessment framework that integrates the main components of the food value chain (FVC), including natural resources, food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. The framework p...

Since the 1990s, community based organisations (CBOs) such as farmer groups have been at the forefront of development strategies, positioned as key partners for enhancing livelihoods and reducing poverty. The success of any project, however, depends on how effectively the farmer groups function and evaluate their progress. In early 2015, an innovat...

In this workshop, we will interrogate the notion of „food justice“ and its potential as an organizing tool in the food movement on a global scale. The first presentation will detail how the radical analysis implicit in food justice draws on an understanding of the social structures underlying inequalities evident in the socio-spatial organization o...

Improving food security and livelihood conditions of vulnerable rural populations in sub-Saharan Africa has been an on-going challenge. Innovations, suitable to context-specific circumstances of small-scale farmers, are intended to reduce poverty and increase food security. Therefore, it is indispensable to collaboratively identify farmers’ views a...

Although Nakuru County, Kenya is most known for Lake Nakuru National Park where tourists are awed by giraffes and rhinos, just outside the border of the park, the land is used by small-scale mixed dairy farms. Dairy is a vital component for sustaining rural livelihoods in this region, from smallholder dairy farmers to milk transporters and small-sc...

There has been considerable interest in establishing farmer groups based on the assumptions that groups give farmers bargaining power, enable cost-effective delivery of extension services, and empower members to influence policies (Salifu et al. 2012). However, research has also shown that many groups fail, often due to issues pertaining to social...

Although attention has been given to the importance of democratized research relationships, power imbalances in knowledge creation remain integral to researcher-participant relations in agricultural research and rural development. With the intention to co-produce knowledge for change with smallholder farmer groups, two transdisciplinary research pr...

Research and development (R&D) projects aiming to improve food security often fail to achieve their goals when scientists develop ‘interventions’ outside of the context for which they are intended. Transdisciplinary approaches in R&D have been introduced with the goal of improving food security with rural producers rather than for rural producers....

The likelihood that smallholder farmers adopt innovations depends inter alia on their view of their problem and resource situation, and on their assessment of the innovation in relation to the various forms of capital and capabilities needed to implement it. Farmers’ views and assessments are in turn influenced by multiple cultural and socio-econom...

In 2006, the European Union reformed its sugar regime, reducing the price for sugar by 36%. To cushion the impact on traditional overseas suppliers, an ‘Aid for Trade’ programme called the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP) was implemented. This paper explores the impacts of the AMSP in Swaziland. The authors discuss emergent...

This article focuses on the way the Anglophone Caribbean succumbed to the overhaul of the European Union sugar trade and how these countries have attempted to restructure their economies in its wake. We show how the protagonists of reform gave a sense of inevitability to the demise of the Commonwealth trade system and conveyed (unrealistic) strateg...

This article demonstrates how certain stories, voices and values around agro-food networks can be made powerful by documentary film. Our central argument is that documentaries mobilize ethics by presenting a partial and affective account of their subject matter, which makes their audience feel differently about the social relations that underpin th...

This paper draws inspiration from an elderly sugarcane farmer in Barbados, Mr Thompson, who took part in a participatory video (PV) project and informal life history interviews with the author in 2007. The author mobilises Mr Thompson's life history as a situated account of the influence of the European Union (EU) sugar regime, considering how this...

Sarah Whatmore has argued that '[t]here is an urgent need to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject'. But how does one do this? What k...

All markets are embedded in ethical relations and moral discourses. This is often forgotten or ignored in alternative agrofood studies, where there has been a frequent assumption that 'ethics' can be inserted into markets (Trentmann, 2007), or are only acknowledged in products certified as 'ethical' and suchlike (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, & Malpass,...

This paper develops a geographical understanding of ethics by drawing from the author's experiences during a participatory video (PV) project in Barbados. This project framed and informed a partial understanding of the ethical geographies of Caribbean sugar at large (Richardson-Ngwenya, 2009). Taking inspiration from interactions with sugar workers...

Economic geographers and political ecologists have developed valuable analyses of the ways in which the effects of economic globalisation and macro-economic ‘one-size-fits-all’ policies are unevenly distributed. Unpacking the global-local nexus, geographers have argued that such policies evoke heterogeneous responses and results. This article contr...

Economic geographers and political ecologists have developed valuable analyses of the ways in which the effects of economic globalisation and macro-economic 'one-size-fits-all' policies are unevenly distributed. Unpacking the global-local nexus, geographers have argued that such policies evoke heterogeneous responses and results. This article contr...

This is a practical guidebook for community groups and extension workers to use. The guidebook outlines a (Participatory Video) method for creating grant proposals on video, as opposed to using written documents. It hopes to assist community groups in accessing funding via the production of collaborative and community-produced video proposals. A vi...

The key question framing the thesis is: "How can the ethical dimensions of European-Caribbean sugar be understood from different empirical and conceptual perspectives and what are the implications of such understandings for Agrofood and Ethical Geographies?" An overarching contention of the thesis is that all markets have ethics: all food systems a...

Introduction Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Cocoa Planting in the Caribbean Cocoa Producers Technological Changes Conclusion Acknowledgments References

This paper explores the politics of formal physical development planning systems in the Eastern Caribbean. It argues that while Western funding agencies now articulate a more 'democratic' discourse of development in the form of participatory planning, this new approach is more reflective of the politicised anxieties of 'the West' than of the desire...

Fieldwork experiences in the summer of 2003 resulted in confusion regarding the ethical positioning of myself (the interviewer) in relation to the multiple 'actants' that constituted the research subject(s). This paper explores some of these personal issues and conflicts in order to clarify, gain perspective on and critique the nature (and indeed t...